As I write this, the leaves here in Baltimore are just
starting to turn, Halloween is a few weeks off — and
my sister-in-law has just e-mailed to ask what my three
boys want for Christmas. If past years serve as any
indication, she will be done all her shopping, presents
wrapped, by Veterans Day in mid-November. As someone who
quite often doesn't know what I'll be serving for dinner
when I arrive home at 5 p.m., this kind of long-range
planning and execution blows my mind. As much as I try to
stay one step ahead of the game, I inevitably find myself
buying the 7-year-old's birthday present on the way to the
party (and wrapping it with the tape I keep stashed under
the seat) and writing my editor's note on the day we go to
press. (This one was no exception.)

You can imagine then, how flabbergasted I was to learn
about the team of scientists at Johns Hopkins' Applied
Physics Laboratory who have designed the New Horizons
mission to Pluto. The spacecraft they've created will be
hurtling through deepest space for 10 years. Then,
sometime in 2015, they'll wake it up out of "hibernation,"
and all the instruments they spent so many months designing
will start sending back streams of data from 3 billion
miles away. A decade from now. Wow.

In chatting about the APL mission with my Hopkins
internist, he noted how very different his own professional
experience is from that of a New Horizons scientist.
Doctors, as he warns the Hopkins interns he trains, must
thrive on being "reactive." Most mornings, an internist has
no idea what shape the day will take. That largely depends
on the ringing of the phone: whose test results have come
back showing cancer, which patient has woken up with
bronchitis, whose chest pains warrant a consult with a
cardiologist.

I found the conversation comforting because it made me
realize that there is a place in this world for both types
— those who take the long view and those who (by
necessity) don't. Without the first group, we'd have no
master plan for the Johns Hopkins medical campus, no
30-year efforts by Hopkins historians to edit the papers of
Dwight D. Eisenhower. Without the latter, there'd be no
hospital ER, no student counseling center, no Hopkins
scholars writing political commentary in the daily
paper.

All of which offers no excuse for why I can't get my act
together enough to finish my Christmas shopping before
December 24. But hey, this column's done — and with
30 minutes to spare.